Although the attack on Sony has not been credibly connected to Sony’s effort to ruin Hotz’s life, it seems possible that the two are related.  No matter either way; karma is as karma does.

Sony is like the Apple of gaming systems, but a million times more vindictive.

*I should add as a disclaimer that I’m afraid of Sony’s suing me for libel, so everything I said above is false; Sony is an awesome company that has never persecuted anyone for how they tried to use their own hardware.  Sony never tried to ruin anyone’s life; they just wanted justice**.

**And they got it.

I don’t know the details, and I don’t know if what Hotz did was technically illegal or not.  What I do know is that I don’t have much sympathy for companies who rely on legal chicanery for profits.  My sole hope is that this note will redirect interested but ignorant souls to more information on this latest corporate villain.  Go click away.

Kurzweil predicts that by 2045, due to the exponential growth of computing power, we will have computers sufficiently powerful to model and store human brains, or digital simulations of them, and their entire workings.  In this way, we could conceivably upload our consciousnesses into a computer, and, so long as the data is preserved, live forever.

At first, the hypothesis is attractive.  Being part of the cloud gives us much more resilience than our puny human bodies can hold; should anything happen to this node, we can revert to our most recent backup.  No big deal.

In truth, though, I think the concept of uploading one’s brain raises some very fundamental questions about the nature of self.  What am I?  Think about what happens when you upload a document to Google.  Google gets a copy of the document; the original remains on your computer.  Both copies are identical, it is true, but now they can have different destinies.  Someone can edit the document you uploaded, adding a comma here, deleting a paragraph there… and you could do the same thing, but in different places.  With a document as complicated as a human mind, with electrical currents constantly flitting from place to place, atoms jiggling here and there, the editing would begin almost immediately.

So which one is you?  The answer seems to be that both are you – or at least, to an outside observer, both would have the essential characteristics of you.  There would be no single perceiver receiving the input or edits that each separate copy of you experiences.  Each copy of you would regard itself as a separate and unique entity with its own stream of consciousness and edits.  In time, the edits would accumulate sufficiently differently that the two yous might actually behave as very different people.

This gives me the uneasy feeling that the uploading of one’s consciousness to a computer is no act of self-perpetuation, but some sort of mimicry.  On an atomic level, this is definitely true.  But what about on a spiritual level, whatever that means?  More to the point, what about on the level of my experience?  When they give me the anesthesia and plug the electrodes into my brain, will I wake up as biological me, or the electronic copy?  The dilemma is similar to the one faced by the Robert Angier in The Prestige (spoiler ahead).  After Tesla’s machine operates, will he be the him that appears elsewhere in the theater, or the him that falls into the tank to drown?

What is victimhood?  Victimhood is the state that a person enters when he has suffered a crime so heinous that it deprives him of his free will.  I do not mean that only those who suffer mind control, zombification, or a large dose of rufilin can become victims.  On the contrary, I think that in almost all cases, the workings of victimization (the process by which people enter victimhood) is much more subtle.

A metaphor may better explain.  If life is a painting, and man an artist always creating and refining that painting, to become a victim is to suffer large splotches of paint to be dropped on one’s painting at random.  The struggle of the victim is the struggle of the artist to retain control over his painting, to incorporate the blotches meaningfully and beautifully into the finished painting.

In Clarissa, using a conventional definition of victimhood, one might say that Clarissa becomes a victim as soon as Lovelace has raped her.  I do not think this is accurate.  As bad as rape is, Clarissa’s material prospects for future happiness are not much damaged by the rape itself.  After running away from Lovelace, Clarissa receives generous offers from his family that will guarantee that he make “reparation” by marrying her, and provide lavishly for her happily ever after.  In the painting metaphor, though the rape itself is a blotch, it need not affect the regions of the painting distal from itself.

But true damage from the rape comes not from the physical violation itself, but rather from the psychological aftereffects.  Clarissa becomes depressed, loses her appetite, rejects almost every offer of help she receives, and obsesses over death, even to buying her coffin and arranging it in her bedroom.  Eventually, death comes for her.  In summary, every moment of Clarissa’s life from the rape to her death is determined by the rape itself, every one of Clarissa’s actions is an attempt to adjust or respond to the rape.  Even the minor actions of Clarissa’s life, down to dressing and lodging, are affected by the actions she takes to respond to the rape.  In short, the artist has had to completely reshape his painting around the blotch.

(For conventional readers: This interpretation holds even if you accept Clarissa as, not an anorexic miscreant, but a paragon of Christianity: her struggle is to forgive Lovelace; the achievement of a state of mind suitable for Christian salvation, as a result of the crimes against her by Lovelace and her family, requires hours and days of meditation, prayer, reflection, and of course letter-writing, and even at the very end of her life, the balance of this Christian state of mind is so fragile that Clarissa desperately avoids seeing Lovelace for fear that he could upset the balance.)

Clarissa is not Lovelace’s only victim.  He has raped or seduced several other girls, at least some of whom became employees at a whorehouse.  Richardson (the author) spends much ink arguing that Lovelace morally corrupted these girls, by which Richardson means that Lovelace turned them from the path of a decent life, which appears to end in salvation, to a debauched life, which appears to end in hell.  If this is true, then these girls are also victims, having suffered not just Lovelace’s violence or lies, but also material alterations in their future behaviors.

The essential problem of victimhood is how to escape it, and regain one’s free will, or control over one’s own destiny.  Clarissa tries to do this by trying to forgiving Lovelace and engaging in extreme asceticism.  The whorehouse girls try to do it by making the material best of their own situations, and embarking on what was probably one of the few careers available to women in Richardson’s London.

In a way, the response of Clarissa and the whorehouse girls is both the same.  As in the metaphor above, they adjust their lives or their paintings around the insults and blotches offered to them.  Neither regains control in the end, because the attempt adjust a life around a blotch requires a pretense: that the blotch was part of the artist’s design.  Be the adjustments ever so clever, the discerning observer will note the artist’s artifice.  Since art is order directed toward a goal – and so is a good life – the randomness of the blotches and insults is rarely for the best, and in our crudely-adjusted paintings, it will be obvious that the artists have failed to execute their original intentions.  And so they are victims.

Other responses to the state of victimhood are possible.  One could seek vengeance, for example.  Vengeance is an attempt to cut off or isolate the blotch.  The avenger says, “This, over here, is what Nature has done to my painting; it has blotched it, insulted it.  Now, over here, on the other side, is my answer to Nature: the antithesis, the repudiation of the insult offered to me.  Nature has done its will; now I have done mine.”  But vengeance is as unsatisfying as the response of Clarissa and the whores, for vengeance is often hard.  Not only is the part of life that suffered the insult lost, but so also is the part of life subtracted from it to achieve vengeance.  In this way, the avenged crime robs the artist of even more of his painting than the adjusted-around crime.

To the victim, ways of escaping from victimhood are hard to see.  How are we to execute masterpieces of our own lives?  Often it is impossible to see a way of correcting a large blot, and incorporating it with a minimum of disruption, into the original picture.  Clarissa was forced to abandon her vision of herself, happily settled on her paternal estate, doling out charity and virtue, almost entirely.

What’s a victim to do?

Au Revoir Les Enfants

This plot alone makes for a mediocre movie, and mediocrity is the very worst that films concerning the Holocaust can worry about achieving.  Along the lines of Godwin’s Law, it is easy to invoke intense emotion over a charged subject, and so, little credit is due.

A more interesting theme did not fully emerge on first viewing: how does the placement of the film’s characters during the Holocaust contribute to their moral status?  Would we perceive the characters differently if we judged them only by their more mundane moral decisions?

Several examples may merit interesting discussion upon another viewing of the film:

1) Quentin: Quentin bullies other students.  He is curious, but too lazy and arrogant for his academic studies.  He views other talented students with hostility and jealousy.  In Au Revoir, his courage in facing the Nazi intruders redeems these flaws.  In the present day, perhaps every schoolyard bully would evince the same courage against Nazis.  But how many receive that chance?  Why should Quentin receive a higher judgment than the average bully, when his behavior differs only as a result of the caprice of time?

2) Père Jacques: The headmaster seems to run an indifferent school, with too many students, poorly supervised and disciplined.  Everything seems to be on the cheap.  In one moment, Quentin, looking at a fattening pig, remarks to the effect, “They’ll serve this on parents’ day, to give them the impression that we eat well.”  Would the stinginess and neglect of the headmaster be forgivable if he were not also a hero of the Holocaust?

3) Joseph: The kitchen helper is a mere boy, and takes abuse from the other boys because of his lowly status.  On the side, he sells items the students receive from their parents and gives them things they want instead.  When he is caught, he takes the fall.  Au Revoir leads us to condemn him because of his involvement with the Germans, but excluding this, one suspects that the beatings he receives would make him more a martyr than a traitor.

The debate over how circumstances affect a moral evaluation of these characters leads to quite an Aristotelian tangle (do actions matter, or intentions? etc.), but even if not morally enlightening, it is an interesting thought experiment.

Beyond merely contrasting transcendent moral characteristics with mundane ones, our thought experiment might also lead us to ask whether these transcendent characteristics outweigh the mundane ones.

For example, certainly Père Jacques’s heroism is laudable, and its cost is mortal.  But it is easy for a courageous man to exhibit courage when the situation clearly calls for it.  Transcendent struggles often have black and white answers.  What is murkier is how the père ought to act in day-to-day life.  Clearly he has a moral obligation to his students, to teach them, and raise them to be bright, principled, and capable youth.  But how hard must he try?  Must he spend every minute of every day on his task, or just a few?  Perhaps he should spend as many minutes as necessary to give the boys an average education.  But what if this number of minutes is impossibly hard to achieve?

In this character, as a man struggling, and perhaps failing, to overcome the banal challenges of everyday life, Père Jacques is much more familiar to us.  Perhaps many of us could hold our heads high in the face of the Gestapo.  But every man, staring down the barrel of a forty-hour week of drudgery and toil, from time to time turns on a subconscious cruise control, and fails to try his best.

And who knows what the consequences of such cruising might be?  Perhaps mundane moral failures differ from transcendent ones not in their consequences or importance, but only in their frequency.

For one, there is Glenn Greenwald, who has mounted a vigorous opposition to the campaign of misinformation and opprobrium being heaped on Wikileaks.

For another, there is Daniel Ellsberg, the man who brought the Pentagon Papers to the world.  In an open statement with other significant journalists, he has praised the significance of Wikileaks’ work.  One of his supporters, Craig Murray, suffered character assassination similar to that now targeted at Julian Assange.

A loose collective of hackers called Anonymous has attempted to launch retaliatory Denial-of-Service attacks on morally bankrupt corporations who have collaborated with the Obama administration in intimidating and harming Wikileaks.

Finally, there are also villains.  Many of the more cowardly members of the loyal opposition have identified the defense of Wikileaks as a hopeless cause, and have consequently thrown in with the attackers in order to gain credibility as moderates.  The classic cynical opportunist, Joe Lieberman, has spearheaded the misuse of federal power for intimidation.  And finally, Openleaks has decided that this is a good branding opportunity.

We take a moment of silence to thank the heroes and condemn the villains; tomorrow the heroes will be dead and forgotten, and the villains will still have money and power.

So it is that as Wikileaks distributes all across the Internets unheard-of amounts of government secrets, and is attacked by “patriotic hackers” with denial-of-service attacks, as Amazon, Mastercard, and PayPal ostracize Wikileaks, and as U.S. congressmen thunder treason and execution for Julian Assange, the sole item of all of this news that reaches my friends’ ears is that Julian Assange has been arrested for rape.  It certainly seems likely that a paranoid egomaniac with a messianic belief in his mission would give his numerous and powerful enemies such easy ammunition as to commit the most vile and reprehensible of modern crimes, doesn’t it?

And yet still, the sole item of the Wikileaks saga that has reached the ears of my friends through the blogo-Facebook-Twittersphere has been Assange’s arrest for rape.  They contemn those who object to Assange’s arrest.  Rape is a crime, they say.  Equal justice for all.  How can anyone not see that Assange is not only a traitor, but a vile rapist?

Indeed, how very convenient for the U.S. government and its powerful investment banks that Assange committed rape just on the verge of revealing even more destructive secrets… perhaps he should be sent to the same prison camp where those two old Chinese ladies went for protesting the Olympics.

The memory hole is that when all of this is done, the massive and concerted attack of the world’s powers – from Amazon to Twitter to Visa to the government itself – on what they evidently view as the existential threat posed by Julian Assange will be forgotten.

I too will forget.  I have a job to go to.  My family wants Christmas gifts.  My body cries out for food.  My friends want to see me, and I haven’t even begun to read the books and records on my bucket list.  I will die not knowing whence or why I was.  And while all these shackles weigh me down, the one hero who tried to take on the whole system will be mercilessly and almost silently beaten into the ground.  The beating will be savage, short, and nasty, differing from your common bar fight or mugging only in its lethality.  And the only cheering will be that of those spectators like my friends who cheer to see Emmanuel Goldstein brought to justice at last.

Assange’s methods were part of his own downfall.  He dumped on us more secrets than we could easily process.  Just as we are too busy to note his crucifixion, we are too busy to ask why it was that he posed an existential threat – why what he revealed was so dangerous.  The answer to those questions, and the beginning of the end of our blindness, is in the very documents he made public.  But I – we – are too busy to read them.

Tyner, while trying to board an airplane, was faced with the choice between submitting to a full-body scan, revealing the entire outline of his body, testicles, buttocks, and all, or submitting to an open-palm rubdown beginning in his groin area.  After refusing both, and after more than twenty minutes of deliberation on the part of airport security staff, Tyner was escorted from the airport.

The reaction of most Americans has been as slack-jawed as Chris Matthews’ reaction to William Kostric’s audacity.  People can’t understand why anyone would refuse a full-body scan or an invasive pat-down.  “What’s the big deal?” says one Albany resident.

Indeed, while “What’s the big deal?” is an excellent argument for nudism – after all, I’m not concealing illegal drugs in my underwear, so why should I wear any? – it suffers the same blindness that Kostric’s opponents suffered.  They did not realize that sometimes we must exercise our rights just so that they are not forgotten. An unexercised right is a right soon forgotten.  Invite your friend into your house once, and he is grateful.  Do it ten times, and soon he drops by unannounced.  If your friend is Uncle Sam, after a couple years, he’s taken over the master bedroom.  In just the same way, in the years since September 11th, our right against unreasonable search and seizure has eroded, bit by bit, year by year.

Another argument frequently made in defense of these searches – several times during Tyner’s encounter (videos available on his blog), as well as numerous times by lawyer apologists later on – is that “everyone else is submitting peacefully, so why can’t you?”  I fondly recall using this argument to my mother when I was six years old, and sought an allowance as large as my friends had.  This argument is easily answered by Tyner’s own words: “If I don’t object, nobody else will.”

It is high time that somebody objected to the cattle-herding-like experience of airport security, and high time other people followed suit.  Apologists for Uncle Sam – mostly lawyers – are already all over the airwaves explaining to us why our rights don’t, technically, apply.  The fact is, they don’t apply because we choose not to apply them.  Some citizen, wanting to get somewhere in a hurry, was the first to waive his right against unreasonable search and seizure for the sake of convenience.  Soon, others followed suit.  All we have to do is stop waiving our rights, stop flying until this atrocious violation of our privacy and our Fourth Amendment right is ended.  Uncle Sam, faced with torpedoing the airline industry, or taking a step back from the brink of Big Brother, might, just might do the right thing.

What I’m suggesting is a complete boycott of the airline industry.  This is not realistic.  But what is realistic is the National Opt-Out Day being promoted by Brian Sodergren.  I heartily endorse this idea, in which passengers insist on the more labor-intensive pat-down as opposed to the nude body scan.  However, an even better idea might be for every passenger waiting in the airport security lines to write down or memorize this passage, and recite it aloud while undergoing their searches:

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, house, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the places to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

The romance of hearing this passage, the highest law of our land, echoing through the airport corridors that Big Brother has taken over, gives me goosebumps.  Imagine a thousand passengers chanting in unison this passage from our Constitution.  Imagine their voices drowning out the Big Brother pronouncements echoed over the airport speakers that “security is our number one concern”.  For indeed security is not our first concern.  Freedom is our first concern.  Freedom from oppression, freedom from tyranny, freedom from unreasonable and arbitrary search and seizure.  Imagine the patriotism and courage of even a single passenger reciting this passage as some disinterested Gestapo watch his nude body marching past the scanner.

This idea, to say these words, the words of our Constitution, is not easy.  Watching John Tyner’s videos of his security encounter, there are times when you can hear the fear in his voice.  He is dealing with a bunch of callous uniforms who don’t give a crap about him, and would like  to see him arrested for messing up their day.  To himself, he’s a law-abiding citizen who has done nothing wrong; to them, he is less than an insect.  The outrageous coup de grâce is the security officer at the end who tells Tyner that the TSA is going to “bring a case against him” and “he had better make it easier on himself”.

The government can take our freedom.  They can drown it out in technicalities, surround us with complaisant sheep, and browbeat us with pushy security personnel.  But they can’t make us forget that sacred text, and those visionary Founding Fathers who dreamed that our right “shall not be violated.”

Richardson is the master of psychology.  I have seen this written, but not understood what it meant until I read him.  Sixty-eight letters into Clarissa, I have not a clue about the true nature of any of the principals (except that their doom is foretold – Clarissa‘s ending is too well known to escape even my notice).

The reason is not that Richardson has not told me anything about the characters, but rather that he has told me everything about them.  These characters live and breathe with more reality than most people I know.  They are awash in contradictions.  They are one minute passionate, the next reasonable.  They say one thing, and then do another.  They are predictable, determined, wild, and wavering.  They know themselves with astounding insight, and are blind to the nature of their own actions.

Clarissa herself will serve to illustrate.  Clarissa is a young lady famed for her intelligence, her learning, her assiduous morality, her beauty, and her compassion and devotion to her family.  Or so her friend Anna Howe, who gets about a quarter of the text, tells us.  By the end of Letter 68, Clarissa has been locked into her rooms and is being forced into marriage with an obliging stranger on account of her correspondence and interviews with a rake, against her father’s explicit instructions.  Are these the actions of an intelligent, moral, and devoted child?

Clarissa refuses at all costs to marry the stranger, one Mr. Solmes, on account of his greediness and ugliness both of person and of character.  “Death first,” she writes, over and over again.  Meanwhile, she carries on her correspondence with the rake, on the grounds that ceasing to correspond with him will give him cause to do violence to her family.  Her family, more and more concerned that she will run off with the rake, urges her to marry Solmes.  She refuses, but offers to promise not to marry Lovelace, the rake.

On the one hand, all of this looks very bad for Clarissa.  Superficially, looking at this from a long way off, we would say that this is a classic case of a young English lady who has allowed her heart to be carried off by a rake, and will soon allow him to take more precious prizes, ruining herself and dishonouring her family.

But Clarissa provides us with oh-so-many arguments for extenuating circumstances.  She only was polite to Lovelace in the first place because he had initially been well-received in their house.  She only corresponded with him to placate him for the rudeness of other members of her family.  She didn’t mean to meet up with him, he just snuck onto their property unbidden.  She didn’t know he would be at Anna Howe’s house when she visited there.

But seriously, Lovelace doesn’t even matter – if there were no such man as Lovelace in the world, she still wouldn’t want to marry Mr. Solmes.  He is greedy, and has commented one too many times on how fortun-ate the joining of the family properties will be.  He is uneducated, and will bore her.  He is ugly.  She wouldn’t be a good wife for him because she doesn’t love him.  He has entailed too much of his property to her family in prejudice to his own relations.

Plus, her family is so very unreasonable.  Her father refuses to speak to her, and returns her letters unopened.  Her brother and sister are set against her and treat her with disrespect because they want her share of the inheritance.  Her mother is a weakling, secretly on her side but afraid to say anything.  All she wants is a hearing, but they won’t let her speak her case (excepting several dozen letters sent to various family members).  Her uncle and her aunt are secretly on her side, but also bullied by her brother and sister.  She was locked in her room too soon, it is so undignified.  And on, and on, and on.

If I have given her complaints the air of levity, it has been accidental.  The sympathy of the aunt, uncle, and mother do an excellent job of bolstering Anna Howe’s case that Clarissa is actually a good, amazing person who has been put into an untenable situation by the evil machinations of her brother and sister, and Lovelace.  The aunt, uncle, and mother, as well as several other characters, support Clarissa’s reputation for learning and morality.  Clarissa’s own extensive complaints, by their very repetition gain credibility, and the letters of her brother and sister contemn themselves out of their own mouths.

The reputation for morality is itself problematic.  One of the cases where it gets the most play is when, in her correspondence with Clarissa, Anna Howe finds occasion to criticize Clarissa’s family.  Clarissa inevitably rebukes Anna Howe for such criticisms, saying that it is wrong of her to listen to criticisms of her family, and wrong of Anna to put her in such a position.  Anna humbly accepts Clarissa’s rebukes, and acknowledges her superior moral judgment.  This entire sequence happens not once, but over and over again, to the point where it is nearly a leitmotif, or marker, of Clarissa and Anna’s correspondence.

So the question is this: does the lady protest too much?  Sure, Clarissa says she can’t listen to such criticisms, and says she is angry, but what is the effect?  It just keeps happening.  Can you be sorry for something you keep on allowing to happen?  Does pointing out a wrong thing when it happens make you a moral person?  I would think the answer is no to both questions.  As her family points out on other moral points, actions speak louder than words.

But to conclude that Clarissa is immoral, a hypocrite of sorts, is problematic too.  It’s hard not to see Clarissa as some sort of morality tale (especially, again, knowing that it ends with Clarissa’s abduction, imprisonment, tearful reconciliation, and death).  It’s particularly hard given the background of the Puritan movement; reading Clarissa at times recalls Hogarth, although I believe the former preceded the latter by some decades…  But if it’s a morality tale, who is the hero?  The only plausible one is Clarissa herself; she is the only principal held up as an example of good morality, the only character that other characters praise, and aside from the relentless drumbeat of obedience and authority from the parents, the only character to give voice to any moral precepts whatever.  If, by Letter 68, Richardson has used a mouthpiece at all, it has been Clarissa.

Notwithstanding all of Clarissa’s apparent faults and failures, Richardson does an excellent job of making sure every other character is at least equally blackened.  Her father is implacable, wrathful, greedy.  Her mother is spineless.  Her brother is spoiled, impetuous, rash, and greedy.  Her sister is ugly, jealous, and greedy.

I would be fascinated to discover where Richardson lies on the Puritan-Anglican divide, but I will not look it up until I finish the book (only 517 billion letters to go) and make my own best guess.  On the one hand, as I said, Clarissa seems set to be the hero.  The prim, proper, and ostentatious morality of Clarissa is quite Puritan.  But so also is her parents’ emphasis on money, obedience, and authority – a gloomy reversion from Jesus to Yahweh if ever there was one.  But Richardson appears to be condemning all and sundry.  Does that make him an atheist?  It would seem that anyone with sufficient insight into human nature to write Richardson’s characters would have a good understanding that there are no heroes and villains, only people.

A few words about Lovelace: in the first place, Richardson’s transition in style from the letters of Clarissa to the letters of Lovelace is brilliant.  The immediate insight into the minds of the characters by the contrast of their writing styles, without any focus on particular facts or sentences, is something I have never seen paralleled in any literature.  Secondly, Lovelace is commonly supposed to be the villain of Clarissa.  But at least by Letter 68, Lovelace is no more contemnable than Clarissa, on the grounds that we have contemned her.  His intentions are honourable.  He wishes marriage, he is generous of spirit, wishes to do people well, has humbly born much insult from Clarissa’s family, and forebore doing Clarissa’s brother any harm in a duel.  It is only that the end of all his good intentions is coercing Clarissa into secret correspondence and scandalous meetings that makes him a villain.

In preparation for  Clarissa, I read a few modern novels: At Risk, No Place Like Home, The Broker, True Believer, to name a few.  One of my great disappointments was the lack of character psychology.  These writers know how to turn a plot, but their characters are mere hodgepodges of traits.  Richardson was the master.

Bartels et al. are furious at the prospect of the legalization of the growth, distribution, sale, and use of marijuana in California.  They’re not furious because they are personally opposed to the use of marijuana (of course not), but rather because the legalization of marijuana in California would create a conflict between state and federal law concerning marijuana.

Oh lordy, that sounds like trouble.  Is this like what happens when the unstoppable force meets the immovable object?  Will the universe explode?  Definitely not, according to Bartels et al.  Rather, it will turn out that that the immovable object, California law, will be trampled over by the unstoppable force of federal law, because, again, according to Bartels et al., the Constitution’s “Supremacy Clause” trumps anything that those crime-loving Californians might legislate.  You know, treaties and such oblige the U.S. to punish the personal growth and use of marijuana.  What treaties?  Who knows? Bartels et al. are doling out information only in doses that our pot-addled brains can handle.

I have to assume that if Bartels et al. knew of a treaty prohibiting us from saying praying to God to punish pot-smokers, they would exhibit the same zeal in using the Supremacy Clause to suppress our First Amendment free speech and religion rights that they are currently employing to suppress our Ninth and Tenth Amendment rights to be free from inane federal interference.  They are just on the side of the Law.  They are like Kevin Costner in The Untouchables.  They probably have a bunch of fat blunts at home right now just waiting for those pesky treaties to expire.

On a serious note, the lamentably poor Constitutional scholarship of Bartels et al. would benefit from examining the tone of moderation in the Supreme Court’s response to a case very close to the present dispute.  In Gonzales vs. Raich, the Court points out that strict construction of arcane and obsolete sections of the Constitution – such as the Commerce Clause – is not helpful to the legislative process, and that the true power to govern the proper regulation of commerce lies with the people via the ballot box.  Perhaps we should regulate marijuana the same way?  And start at a local level, allow some state to function as a test zone?

You see, we could argue all day about what this section or that section of the Constitution means, and which trumps which, and when states’ rights apply and when they don’t.  Or we could just admit that we all twist the Constitution to our own purposes, and that the issue here isn’t the Constitution, but rather that I’m in favor of civil rights and that Bartels et al. are a bunch of violent-by-proxy evangelists bent on using the law of the land as a club to beat anyone who opposes their puritanical code of personal morality.

Once we see the discourse on this rational level, we can ask what are the real issues.  That’s really a question for Californians, since the exceptional status of marijuana in California will certainly affect a drug tourism industry.  But even the rest of us can consider such questions as “Is marijuana harmful?” or “What is the proper extent of governmental regulation of drug use?”

My guess is that Bartels et al. are perfectly cognizant of the relative importance of these issues, but realize that their fear-driven perspective on marijuana is becoming increasingly lonely.  Well, you have to admire a group that will do absolutely anything to get what they want.

Note: I realize that this turns some of my previous arguments in defense of the right to keep and bear arms on their head.  The ignorant raving of this bunch of Cro-Magnons has opened my eyes.  I shall endeavor to confine my future arguments in defense of an expanded right to keep and bear arms to practical considerations and the same local approach that I would here advocate for marijuana.  The salient practical considerations concerning firearms is that they are the ultimate check on an increasingly tyrannical federal power.  See the Federalist 46.